1 Edward Everett’s Attitude Towards American English, New England Quarterly, March, 1939, pp. 112–29.
2 I am indebted here to Read, just cited.
1 Fenimore Cooper, Critic of His Times; New York, 1931, Ch. X. I am indebted here to Mr. F. Reed Alvord, of Hamilton, N. Y.
2 The American use of creek to designate any small stream had been remarked by various earlier commentators on American English, including Pickering, Theodoric Romeyn Beck, and Robley Dunglison. The DAE’s first example is dated 1638. It is usually pronounced crick.
3 Square, in the sense of a small city park, is not an Americanism. The DAE traces it to 1698 in Philadelphia, but the NED finds an English example eleven years older. But public square seems to be of American origin, though the DAE, which traces it to 1786, does not so mark it. Square, in the sense of a city block or of the distance between one street and the next, apparently originated in Philadelphia, where William Penn laid out the city in rectangles — the first time this was done in America, and possibly in the world. All the other early American cities, at least in their older parts, have many crooked streets.
4 The use of pond, in England, is confined with few exceptions to artificial bodies of water, but it began to be applied to natural lakes in America so early as 1622, and in the name of Walden Fond it is familiar in that meaning to all readers of Thoreau.
5 The misapplication of river to arms of the sea is quite as common in England as in America; the lower Thames, for example, is actually an inlet of the North Sea, and is often called, more properly, an estuary.
1 A long and interesting discussion of the u-sound in American speech is in The English Language in America, by George Philip Krapp; New York, 1925, Vol. II, pp. 155 ff. Krapp shows that a y-sound, in American usage is seldom heard after l or r. After d, t, th, n, sh, s and z the current practice varies, with y the most marked in the Boston area and the South. Noah Webster was violently against it, and advocated the simple u in even few, making it rhyme with zoo.
2 Here Cooper, who was certainly no phonologist, is apparently trying to say that the u should be preceded by the y-sound, as in pure and beauty.
3 Where Cooper heard the pronunciation he denounced, or what his authority was for those he recommended, I do not know. Injine for engine survives in the common speech of today, but certainly not injin, which is reserved for Indian. I have never heard ensign with the accent on the second syllable. In the common speech the first is heavily accented, and the second is drawn out. In the Navy the first is also accented, but the second is clipped.
4 These were all Eighteenth Century pronunciations, surviving in England. Clark survives to this day. Cow-cumber is still occasionally heard in the United States, especially among rustics. In the early days cucumber was often so spelled. The DAE’s first example is dated 1685, and its last (not consciously dialectical) 1742.
5 Leftenant is still the usual English pronunciation of lieutenant.
6 For either and neither see AL4, p. 341.
1 Boss is obviously derived from the Dutch baas, but though it must have been familiar, at least in New York, in the Seventeenth Century, it did not come into general use until the Nineteenth. The DAE’s first example is dated 1806. It was propagated by the proletarian self-assertion that preceded the opening of the first Century of the Common Man, with Jackson’s election in 1828.
2 Sabbath for Sunday was an inheritance from the Puritans. It survived generally until after the Civil War, and is still used by some of the ultra-pious. Cooper’s chapter On Language is reprinted in full in Mathews, pp. 123–29.
3 In 1868 he became president of a primeval National Institute of Letters, Arts and Sciences which proposed, among other things, to police the language. The chairman of its executive committee was the implacable pedant, Richard Grant White. John Bigelow described the project as one designed “to throw the French Academy into the shade.” See American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech, by Allen Walker Read, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1936, pp. 1141–79.
1 I should add in fairness that some of the other words that Bryant banned belonged to the worst newspaper jargon of the time, and probably deserved to be frowned upon, e.g., above and over for more than, casket for coffin, claimed for asserted, decease as a verb, devouring element for fire, to inaugurate for to begin, in our midst, juvenile for boy, lady for wife, to loan for to lend, Mrs. Governor, ovation, party for person, posted for informed, rendition for performance, Rev. without the the, to state for to say, and on the tapis. But he also prohibited such terms as to beat for to defeat, to collide, to graduate for to be graduated, House for House of Representatives, humbug, loafer, rowdy and on yesterday. On yesterday still appears every day in the Congressional Record, and the rest are in impeccable American use.
2 The Outlook for American Prose; Chicago, 1926, p. 21.
3 Emersonian Unconventionalities, American Speech, Oct., 1936, p. 272.
4 Melville’s Contribution to English, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Sept., 1941, pp. 797–808. Under the same title Purcell corrected a few errors in American Speech, Oct., 1943, p. 211. See also Some Americanisms in Moby Dick, by William S. Ament, American Speech, June, 1932, pp. 365–67.
1 Poe’s Contributions to English, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 73–74.
2 Review of A Concordance of the Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, by Brandford A. Booth and Claude E. Jones; Baltimore, 1941, in American Speech, April, 1942, p. 112. Ramsay handles this concordance roughly; it is, in fact, of very small value. It should be remembered that Poe’s poetical output was not large, and that this fact may reduce his apparent vocabulary.
3 Six other derivatives are run back by the NED to dates earlier than 1831: tintinnabulatory to 1827, tintannabulism to 1826, tintinnabulant to 1812, tintinnabulous to 1791, tintinnabulery to 1787 and tintinnabular to 1767.
4 Hawthorne may have been the author of three articles on “correct English” which appeared in the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, June and Sept., 1835, and June, 1836. This magazine was published by S. G. Goodrich, for whom he had worked off and on since c. 1828. He was its editor in 1836 at $500 a year. I am indebted here to Mr. John H. Kou-wenhoven of New York.
1 Philadelphia, 1888.
2 April, pp. 460 ff. Traubel says that he found an alternative title in Whitman’s papers, to wit, The Primer of Words: for American Young Men and Women, for Literati, Orators, Teachers, Musicians, Judges, Presidents, &c. He adds: “Whitman told me that when the idea of the American Primer first came to him it was for a lecture. He wrote at this thing in the early 50s —even as far along as 1856–57. And there is evidence that he made brief additions to it from time to time in the ten years that followed. But after 1855, when he succeeded in issuing the first edition of Leaves of Grass, some of his old plans were abandoned — this lecture scheme with others —, and certain new plans were formulated. The Primer was thenceforth, as a distinct project, held in abeyance.” An American Primer was reprinted in an edition of 500 copies; Boston, 1904.
1 Yawp, the most famous, is commonly supposed to have been his invention, but the DAE traces it to 1835, when it was used by J. H. In-graham in The South-West. Gawk has been in use in England since the early Eighteenth Century.
2 Walt Whitman and the French Language, American Speech, May, 1926, p. 425.
3 Poe had a weakness for terms of the same sort, e.g., recherché, outré, dégagé and littérateur. See The French of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edith Philips, American Speech, March, 1927, pp. 270–74.
1 His unhappy efforts to devise new words of English material are described in Walt Whitman’s Neologisms, by Louise Pound, American Mercury, Feb., 1925, pp. 199–201. Dr. Pound apparently includes sit, the infinitive of the verb used as a noun, as one of them. It was actually borrowed from the argot of printers, and is listed in Charles T. Jacobi’s Printers’ Vocabulary as an abbreviation of situation. Whitman’s writings on language are well
summarized in Walt Whitman and the American Language, by Leon Howard, American Speech, Aug., 1930, pp. 441–51. In A Study of Whitman’s Diction, University of Texas Studies in English, No. 16, 1936, pp. 115–24, Rebecca Coy shows that the Americanisms in Leaves of Grass are not numerous.
2 The savagely anti-American Gifford had retired as. editor in 1824 and died in 1826, but his heirs and assigns were carrying the torch.
3 In a series called Live Books Resurrected, edited by L. Stanley Jast. It was reviewed in the London Times Literary Supplement, May 15, 1943.
1 Feb., 1855, p. 213.
2 The Development of Faith in the Dictionary in America, read before the Present Day English section of the Modern Language Association at Philadelphia, Dec. 29, 1934. So far as I am aware this paper has not been published, but I have had access to it by the courtesy of the author.
1 The Cambridge History of American Literature; New York, 1918; Vol. II, p. 151. See also American Idiom in the Major Downing Letters, by Ernest E. Leisy, American Speech, April, 1933, pp. 78–79.
2 Haliburton was not an American, but a Nova Scotian, and his Sam Slick, the Yankee clock peddler, was depicted with British bias. He was frequently accused of misrepresentations, not only in character but also in speech. Said an anonymous writer in Putnam’s Monthly, Aug., 1854, p. 227: “He writes tales and sketches of American life on purpose for the English market. He knows about as much of genuine Yankee character as one half the comic actors who attempt to personate it in the stage, i.e., he knows a few enormous exaggerations and nothing more. His representations, however, are received in England as the true thing, and nine out of ten of the current slang expressions which the English ascribe to Yankees are taken from his books, never having been heard of in Yankee land. They strike a New Englander as oddly as they do John Bull himself, and are most likely inventions of the author.” Haliburton, who was a judge in Nova Scotia from 1828 to 1856, contributed his first Sam Slick sketches to the Nova Scotian of Halifax in 1835. Collections of them were brought out in 1837, 1838 and 1840. Despite their prejudiced tone they were widely reprinted in American newspapers.
1 A study of words invented by Thompson or borrowed by him from the popular speech of his time is in Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., Neologist, by J. Louis Kuethe, American Speech, April, 1937. In it he is credited with introducing gutter-snipe, forty-rod, baggage-smasher, brass-knuckles, bucksaw, citified, muley-cow, hot stuff and various other now familiar Americanisms. On the appearance of the DAE it turned out that Thompson had been anticipated in some of these, but in other cases his priority was maintained. In some instances the DAE’s first examples are from his writings.
2 Some of these humorists, notably Browne and Leland, had considerable successes in England, and, as R. H. Heindel says in The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914; Philadelphia, 1940, p. 305, “broke down the resistance to Americanisms.” But that breaking down, of course, was only partial and only transitory. The English reviewers, in the main, sneered at them, despite their popularity. In Every Saturday (Boston), July 10, 1869, p. 52, is a reprint of a curious attack on Le-land’s German dialect verses from an unnamed English review. It dismisses them loftily as “written in the jargon of a German clown who has half learned English” and actually undertakes to translate one of the most famous of them, Han’s Breitmann’s Barty, into orthodox English! A good account of the early humorists, with special reference to their sources, is in Native American Humor (1800–1900), by Walter Blair; New York, 1937.
1 The significance of The Biglow Papers as a philological document was quickly recognized. Said an anonymous writer in Putnam’s Monthly, May, 1853, p. 554: “This is an unmistakably American performance.… It is a valuable repository of the dialectic peculiarities of New England.”
2 In the Policies of the Dictionary of American English, Dialect Notes, July-Dec., 1938, p. 630. Allen Walker Read called this essay “probably the most important discussion of American English in the Nineteenth Century.”
3 He permitted himself, for example, to denounce slang on the ground that it “is always vulgar,” and he thought it worth while to defend Hosea Big-low at some length against the idiotic charge of “speaking of sacred things familiarly.”
1 Speech was not the main theme of his On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, 1869, but that famous essay did not altogether overlook it. The Englishman coming to America, he said in it, felt himself “defrauded, nay, even outraged” because he found “a people speaking what he admits to be something like English, and yet so very different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at home.… ‘How am I vulgar?’ asks the culprit, shudderingly. ‘Because thou art not like unto Us,’ answers Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and there is no more to be said.… We did not pronounce the diphthong ou as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s.”
2 I hailed the marvel in The Greatest of American Writers, Smart Set, June, 1910, pp. 153–54. It was an astonishing event indeed, and without a parallel until May, 1944, when the empurpled illuminati of the American Academy of Arts and Letters discovered at last that Theodore Dreiser was an important American novelist, and paid him $1,000 in cash, apparently as an indemnity for 44 years’ lofty neglect of him.
3 University of Missouri Studies, Jan. 1, 1938. Dr. Emberson’s Mark Twain’s Vocabulary: A General Survey was published in the same series, July 1, 1935. In 1930 the Mark Twain Society of Webster Groves. Mo., published A Vocabulary Study of The Gilded Age, by Alma Borth Martin. It is of small value and is defaced by a donkeyish foreword by Hamlin Garland.
1 So far as I know, there is no study in English of Harte’s vocabulary. In German there is Die Verwendung der Mundart bei Bret Harte, by Heinrich Kessler, Beiträge zur Erforschung der Sprache und Kultur Englands und Amerikas, Vol. V, No. 2, 1928.
2 An anonymous reviewer of the DAE in the Pathfinder (Washington), Feb. 28, 1944, says that Mark “contributed more American words [to it] than any other writer, while Emerson stuck closely to English usage and contributed none.”
1 An attempt to sort out some of these dialects is made in Mark Twain and American Dialect, by Katherine Buxbaum, American Speech, Feb., 1927, pp. 233–36.
2 Concerning the American Language was included in The Stolen White Elephant; Boston, 1882. On July 20, 1879, Mark had written in his London note-book: “One must have a play-book at an English play — the English accent is so different one cannot understand or follow the actors. The same in ordinary conversation which one tries to hear.”
3 Howells’s own prose, as he advanced in life, showed some concession to American idiom, but he never quite got over his fear of vulgarity. See Conservatism in American Speech, by George H. McKnight, American Speech, Oct., 1925, pp. 7 and 8, and my Prejudices: First Series; New York, 1919, especially p. 58.
1 After being graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary Van Dyke pastored a church at Newport, R. I., and was then elevated to the pulpit of the Brick Presbyterian in New York. In 1900 he became professor of English literature at Princeton. In 1913 his services to the Anglo-Saxon Kultur were rewarded with the post of minister to the Netherlands and Luxemburg. After this service he returned to Princeton, where he remained until 1923. He was a D.D. of Princeton, Harvard and Yale, and an Oxford D.C.L. He was one of the first ornaments of the national letters drafted for the National Institute of Arts and Letters and rose to be its president. Later he became a member of its upper chamber, the American Academy, along with Brander Matthews, Robert Underwood Johnson, George W. Cable, T. R. Lounsbury, William M. Sloane, Henry Cabot Lodge, Owen Wister, Hamlin Garland, Paul Elmer More, John H. Finley and other such immortals. He died in 1933.
2 Van Dyke Scoffs at Ideas of New Language in U. S., New York Tribune, June 4. The statement was discussed at length in the newspapers during the month following, and most of them appeared to agree with Van Dyke. Some of their editorials we
re summarized in a Daily Editorial Digest then current, printed in a number of papers, e.g., the Roanoke (Va.) World-News, July 4; the Washington Star, July 3; the Salt Lake City Deseret News, July 6; and the Oklahoma City Oklahoman July 6.
3 The American Language, 3rd ed.; New York, 1923, pp. 398–402.
4 Scott, who died in 1930, was a completely humorless man and an almost archetypical pedagogue. He was a delegate to the unfortunate London conference of 1927. He professed rhetoric at Ann Arbor for more than forty years and also taught journalism, though he knew no more about it than a child. He was also an author, and his bibliography includes Memorable Passages from the Bible, 1906; Selections from the Old Testament, 1910; Paragraph Writing, 1893; Introduction to Literary Criticism, 1899; Aphorisms for Teachers of English Composition, 1905; and A Brief English Grammar, 1905.
1 Academy Papers appeared as a book in 1925. It consisted of discourses delivered before the Academy on the Blashfield Foundation between 1916 and 1925. I reviewed it in the American Mercury, Jan., 1926, pp. 122–23, and reprinted my review in Prejudices: Sixth Series; New York, 1927, pp. 155–59. The other contributors to the volume were Paul Elmer More, Bliss Perry, Paul Shorey, Brander Matthews, Robert Underwood Johnson, William M. Sloane and W. C. Brownell.
2 His writings on the subject are in his Americanisms and Briticisms, Etc.; New York, 1892; Parts of Speech; New York, 1901; The American of the Future; New York, 1909; and Essays on English; New York, 1921.
3 In 1936 Mr. Samuel L. M. Barlow of New York took me politely to task for ascribing a war-time Anglomania to Matthews, and on March 8, 1938 Arthur Guiterman denounced me for it in the New York Times. Unhappily, I find myself constrained to stand upon the evidence presented in AL4, pp. 65–66. Certainly Matthews made no effort, while the band was playing, to challenge the silly rantings of Van Dyke, Scott and company.
1 A Fable for Critics, 1848.
2 “The usage of the leading American writers of the period of Lowell and Holmes,” says H. W. Horwill in American Variations, S. P. E. Tract No. XLV, 1936, “was more closely-akin to that of the English writers of their day than is that of Twentieth Century American writers to their contemporaries in England. English readers today have greater need of a glossary for Theodore Dreiser than their fathers and grandfathers had for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Possibly the ambition of so many American writers of the present generation to emancipate themselves from Old World models has something to do with this.”
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